


The Orange Carbuncle

by Prochytes



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Enola Holmes (2020), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:14:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27008668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prochytes/pseuds/Prochytes
Summary: One fake widow helps another investigate a death.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 26





	The Orange Carbuncle

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the 2020 _Enola Holmes_ film (and inconsistent with the canon of the books) and _Avengers: Endgame_ ; small spoilers for _Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D._ to the end of S3. Dark themes, and references to canonical character death.

The stranger in black was a trained combatant; that much was clear. She was fast, agile, and seemed more at home with holds and throws than strikes. This suited Natasha, fairly literally, down to the ground; it was a matter of only moments before the two opponents were grappling in earnest, noses and mouths scant inches from the small rocks and thin soil of the mountain path. Yet there was, for all the black-clad woman’s skill, a certain ponderous elaboration to her moves, which went beyond old-school almost into fustian. Natasha was reminded of the way that Happy Hogan boxed.

“Now would be the time for you to give,” Natasha gasped, at last. “You’re good enough to know that I have you cold.”

Her opponent strained against the hold a couple of seconds longer. Then she nodded, and went limp. “I believe that the idiom across the herring-pond is ‘Uncle’.”

“Good.” Natasha relaxed her grip. “Who are you?”

“One, it would seem, who is not as accomplished at discreet tailing as she would like to think. May I sit up?”

“Go ahead.” The other struggled to a sitting position. Natasha’s eyes widened, as she finally took in the exact nature of that sable outfit. The other woman – a brunette who looked about Natasha’s own age, with an equally lithe and slightly bigger build – was clad in the veil and rustling black of widow’s weeds. “Oh – you have GOT to be kidding me.”

The stranger eyed her warily. “I’m sorry?”

“OK, Coulson.” Natasha was addressing the crisp mountain air. “You’ve had your fun. ‘End simulation’, or whatever.”

“Who is ‘Coulson’?” the stranger asked. Her puzzlement seemed entirely genuine. Of course, Phil would undoubtedly have ordered his little tech-Nibelungen Brits to code it that way.

“You’re trying to tell me that I’m not in TAHITI?”

“Why would you think that?” The stranger puffed, and watched her breath spin cloud out of the air. “The current clime does not suggest the Tropics.”

Natasha, as so often in her life, pondered the competing charms of discretion and disclosure. Unusually, she opted for a limited form of the latter. If this _was_ some bizarrely elaborate virtual interrogation, her hypothetical captors would already be cognizant of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Dropping intel they already knew might give her an in; you had to chum the waters to catch sharks. “I have – I had – a colleague named Phil Coulson. He possesses memory- and perception-altering technology called TAHITI. Coulson himself couldn’t physically subdue me…”

“Our little tussle proved that’s quite a challenge.”

“… but May – another old colleague – could, if she had a good day and I didn’t. That’s before we even start thinking about Earthquake Girl, or the Supersonic Boomerang.” The stranger raised an eyebrow. “Some of the hires after I left got kinda funky. So… when I find myself walking along a mountain path in, I think,” Natasha glanced around at the brooding stone, “the Alps, with no memory at all of how I got here, and then make a woman tailing me who dresses like a widow… TAHITI’s where my thoughts would fly.”

“A widow?” The stranger looked down at herself. “Oh. That’s happened again. I can see how my garb might appear outlandish. But I fail to discern why you would interpret that as a comment on your good self.”

“You seriously have no idea who I am?” Again, the puzzlement seemed authentic. “Then why are you dressed like that?”

“The outfit wards off casual conversation. People, I find, are rather afraid of widows.”

“That has been my experience,” said Natasha.

***

“Why were you tailing me?” Natasha skirted, with gymnast’s grace, a minor rock-fall, which the stranger had just circumvented with equal ease. They were continuing along the path which Natasha had found herself following. This might mean walking into an ambush, or pandering to the program, if this wasn’t real. Staying put had seemed unlikely to be fruitful, though, and Natasha was finding herself increasingly convinced of her new companion’s good intentions.

“I’m investigating a death.”

“Mountaineering fatality?”

“In a manner of speaking."

“Why?”

“I’m a consulting detective. Whereas you, unless I miss my guess, are, or were, a secret agent.”

“I was.” Natasha had not missed the other’s backward glance. “But one burned long ago, and very thoroughly, by herself. These days, I sort out… other problems, which has its perks. Like sometimes outwitting the smartest man who’s ever lived.”

“Hmm.”

“You sound sceptical.”

“I have myself often outwitted the smartest man who’s ever lived.” The stranger hitched her skirt to hop over more debris. “I do not recall that you were present.”

“You know Tony Stark?”

“Tony Stark, whoever he may be, is not the smartest man who’s ever lived.”

“Tony Stark invented clean energy. Tony Stark invented a nigh-unstoppable army of killer automatons…” the stranger raised an eyebrow again “… which, I admit, was not his smartest hour. Tony Stark invented _time-travel_.” Natasha frowned for a moment, as something uncoiled at the back of her mind, but carried on regardless: “I think he has a convincing claim.”

“Has Tony Stark discovered a re-agent which is precipitated by hoemoglobin, and by nothing else?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“Then Tony Stark has catching up to do.”

Natasha scowled at the stranger’s back, as she continued up the path. “To who?”

“My brother,” the stranger smiled to herself, “Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

“Your brother is a fictional detective?”

“Ah.” A moue of distaste. “You’ve been misled by those fables in _The Strand_. Sherlock’s chronicler would _not_ be restrained from allowing his fancy to play over what my brother told him.”

“Those stories were true?”

“They contained elements of truth – though not me.”

“‘The Second Stain’?”

“Was third.”

“‘The Three Garridebs’?”

“Were five.”

“‘The Blue Carbuncle’?”

“Was orange. No hard-felt hat, and certainly no goose.” The stranger hacked irritably at some resilient mountain verdure. “Mr. Doyle was not equal to the temptation for a ‘Christmas Special’.”

Natasha pondered these revelations. Insanity, of course, was very possible. This was, after all, a woman who dressed as a widow to hike on (probably) Alpine paths. And (reverting to the TAHITI hypothesis) gratuitous literary references stank of Coulson. It was exactly the sort of fannish whimsy in which he would indulge himself, if May wasn’t in the room to stare at him.

On the other hand, Natasha thought of Thor. The knowledge that one sometimes got drunk with a man about whom people had literally written Eddas was a game-changer for the possibilities of historical gonzo journalism. She decided, for the moment, to play along.

“You and your brother were a team?”

“We were, for many years.” The smile had returned. “There was never anyone else who could think like us, or who was privileged to see what we had seen.” She sighed. “Then came the Adventure of the Orange Carbuncle, for which the world was never quite prepared. And that explains why I have come back here.”

***

Natasha had become aware, as they continued to advance, of a low thrumming, at the edge of hearing. As one who had been, for professional reasons, rather too close on several occasions to powering-up and soon-to-be-hastily-decommissioned Doomsday Weapons, she was usually unsettled by such vibrations; this thrumming, however, had less of a man-made feel. It was getting louder.

“We had an enemy,” the stranger continued, “Sherlock and I: ex-Professor Moriarty, of mathematical celebrity. He was the Napoleon of Crime.”

“I’ve heard of him,” said Natasha. “ _Strand_ , again.”

“That would have galled the Professor above all things – to have been ‘burned’ (was that your word?) so thoroughly that the whole world knows his name. I suspect, however, o reader of _The Strand_ , that you are not familiar, e’en now, with the full range and extent of his operations.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mr. Doyle was, in many respects, a credulous fellow, but even he balked at recording our uncannier adventures. He sometimes suffered glimpses of that stranger work to peek through his stolid prose – the red leech, the aluminium crutch, that misbegotten rodent in Sumatra – but no more.”

The stranger’s expression darkened. “James Moriarty was a menace far beyond Doyle’s ability to imagine. The author of _The Dynamics of an Asteroid_ plundered realms beyond the terrestrial sphere. That thirst for the unearthly was what drove Moriarty to seek the Orange Carbuncle. And that was why our enemy made the trip – only a little, little trip – that damned him.”

The path had now begun to turn. Natasha felt the beginnings of a mist in the air, the clammy caress of moisture on her face.

“The Professor had not realized, you see, that he could never use the Orange Carbuncle. He, whose mind, like that of Archimedes, could reckon every grain of sand in Creation, loved not one mote of it, that was not Moriarty. He had nothing to lose. And so the Orange Carbuncle could not be his.”

The stranger frowned as she paused at a final, sharp turn in the path ahead. “But it needed to be someone’s, if we were to put it beyond harm. That was a problem. ” A faint twist of the lips. “What you might perhaps call: ‘The Final Problem’.”

Natasha moved forward to join her. Beyond the turn, the thrumming became a roar. The path ended on the lip of a coal-black, glistening chasm; a torrent hurled itself into the boiling pit below.

“Welcome to the Falls of Reichenbach. This is where I died.”

***

“You’re not serious,” said Natasha.

“Levity was ever my favoured mode,” the stranger looked down into the cauldron, “but not now. This ledge is where we fought, my brother and I. I wasn’t always faster than Sherlock in the matter of deductions, but I was always his better at ju-jitsu – especially when I meant to take the fall. To use the Orange Carbuncle, one must lose what one loves. I made the choice for him, before he could make it for me.”

“And you’re some kind of a ghost, is that it?” Natasha’s voice, for all the cataract’s roar, was a little louder than it needed to be. “Driven by guilt to go on haunting here?”

“Guilt?” The stranger looked back at her with steady eyes. “Why would I feel guilty?”

“Because you left him.” Natasha had stepped forward. “You left him in the world, to suffer on without you. The only one who’d seen what you had seen; the only one who’d done the terrible things you’d done. The only one whose ledger was half as re…”

She stopped. For long seconds, there was no sound at the path’s end, but the cascade’s roar. The woman in black stepped up to Natasha. A bombazine sleeve gently wiped from her cheek the wet there, now, which was not Reichenbach. After another moment, she took Natasha in her arms.

“It is my conjecture,” she said, over Natasha’s shoulder, “based, to be sure, on scanty data, that if one makes the sacrifice for another, the mind is then apt to misplace it. I met, of late, a poor young woman from beyond the stars, whose blackguard of a father sold her so; she remembered instantly what had happened. But for the likes of you and me… Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, needs some coaxing. I said I was here to investigate a death. I didn’t say the death was mine.”

“I was selfish.” Natasha, suddenly so weary, rested her head in the crook of the other’s neck. “Clint wanted to do the same for me.”

“So did Sherlock. But the choice had to be made, and so you made it. If your Clint is like Sherlock, he will grieve; and then, he will endure. Our plan worked. My brother put the Carbuncle beyond harm so thoroughly that, I gather, the best minds in the Universe took more than a century to find and abuse it. Your friend may not be the smartest man who’s ever lived…”

“Very not…”

“… but I have no doubt that he will rise to the challenge, just the same. Do not blame yourself for the exercise of virtue.”

“Thank you,” Natasha pulled back to look the stranger in the face. “I still don’t know your name.”

“Enola Holmes.” She no longer seemed a thirtysomething woman. The girl in front of Natasha now looked, at most, sixteen, eyes bright with desire for all the riddles of the untravelled world. “Detective, decipherer. Finder of lost souls. Now and forever, at your service.”

FINIS

**Author's Note:**

> This fic uses quotations from the 2020 _Enola Holmes_ film, and also from ACD's "A Study in Scarlet" and "The Adventure of the Final Problem". I'm always a little uncomfortable at how playing with the Holmes canon pretty much forces one (as here) to make "ACD -in-the-story" a dim-witted hack (to justify why he got so much wrong), so I'll take this opportunity to salute once more the authentic ACD, who gave us Sherlock Holmes, and Nancy Springer, who gave us his sister.


End file.
